Dictate of prudence...concerning the election petition

As I made my way through town today, I could not help but feel the sense of tension and unease on faces of people; from white collar to blue collar workers, to ordinary people minding their business. This tension is a result of the uncertainty about the aftermath of the verdict of the Supreme Court in the election petition case. The tension has been heightened by,if not brought about by people who have embarked on various noise making endeavours which they christened “Peace Campaigns” and have managed to put a lot of fear in the hearts and minds of many of our people, so much have they succeeded in this enterprise that Ghanaians from all over the world are inquiring about what is happening at home. People have began hording food and other necessities and I have heard and witnessed a rush on banks for withdrawal of deposits. It is in the light of the above that I want to share some thought.

I have not been around for long ,but I have been here long enough to have seen the corpse of the powerful Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi with flies hovering over him like a carcass of a swine on February 22, 2002 when he was killed by MPLA soldiers in Moxico Province of Angola.I still remember in graphic details,the sight of the late Libyan Leader,Muamar Ghadafi,being dragged from a culvert like a rat as he begged his captors for mercy. These were men who at the height of their powers were ‘gods’;their will always prevailed.
I have also not forgotten the sight of President Mobutu running away(by air) from Kinshasha when Laurent Kabila and his rebel army reached the gate of the capital,ironically,Lauent Kabila himself was assassinated just like his mentor Lumumba. Slobodan Milosovic and Robert Guei had to runway from Belgrade as demonstrator marched from Belgrade Square and Central Abidjan even though they wanted to hold on to power even if that meant death and destruction.What about Hosni Mubarak of Egypt,Ben Ali of Tunisia,Ali Saleh of Yeme?These were very strong and powerful men but there is no person on earth,who can outsmart everybody all of the time;the safest and most prudent thing to do is to play by the rules of engagement.

As a boy growing up in the 1980’s,Sunday evenings were moments I eagerly look up because to with great expectation. This was because ‘Akan Drama’ showed on television on Sunday evenings. One of the most interesting lines from the sayings of those dramatist I have kept up on to this day is this corrupted Hausa saying “Bari bari bakabari ba,kabari banza”,which mean something to the effect that, he who does not heed advice,is headed for destruction.

At the battle of Agincourt in 1415,the French were so sure of victory that when Henry V of England offered the French,who were led by Constable Charles d'Albret, ‘terms for peace’, the offer was rejected outright by the French who were very confident of victory, their confidence born out of their numerical strength. They outnumbered Henry’s army 5:1. But defeat was what fate had for them.

If King George III of Great Britain knew what was to come after his rejection of the demands of the American Colonist who felt overtaxed and unrepresented, he certainly would have granted them some concessions, but so conceited and bigoted was he that he wanted to force them into submission by the sword and in the end he lost all the thirteen state whose representatives met in Philadelphia on 4th July 1776 and declared independence.

In the end ,nobody is capable of t driving Ghana on to a path of destruction without a section of the citizenry helping in such destructive endeavour. One person or a small band can shout and insult all they want but the tumult would soon subsides and the country will move on. Our collective interest as a people is a million times more important and holier both in the sight of men and in the sight of God than the interest of any person(s).

It is in the interest of both the victors and the vanquished to keep the peace, in fact,that is in the interest of the country and humanity at large. The victors must show magnanimity in victory and however hard it might be,the vanquished too must be gracious in defeat.For the vanquished, it is in your interest to keep the peace, and live to fight another day. For that represents the most prudent option, prudence indeed dictates that whenever we are confronted with the choice of two evils, we must choose the lesser of the two. Keeping the peace and living to fight another day represents the lesser of the two evils for the vanquished, and indeed the prudent option. You can outwit some people sometimes, but you can’t outwit all the people all the time.A word to the prudent…




Yusif Mustapha

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